Foliations on Riemannian Manifolds

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Poincare developed methods for the study of global, qualitative properties of solutions of dynamical systems in situations where explicit solution methods had failed: He discovered that the study of the geometry of the space of trajectories of a dynamical system reveals complex phenomena. This book introduces the reader to the theory of foliations, and explores some of the interactions of foliations with the Riemannian geometry of the ambient manifold. The author begins with motivations for the study of the subject and proceeds to discuss the instructive special case of transversally oriented foliations of codimension one. The second part of the book covers such topics as foliations by level hypersurfaces, infinitesimal automorphisms and basic forms, flows, Lie foliations, and twisted duality.